Home Office Open Space Coordinator

At a glance

The Home Office is currently delivering the National Law Enforcement Data Programme. This is designed to bring together data from the Police National Computer (PNC) and intelligence data from the Police National Database (PND), to provide a consolidated view of these national records.

The programme is borne out of the need to modernise, upgrade and amalgamate these two systems. The aim is that this will result in joined up information for Law Enforcement and other agencies, when required and where this is proportionate. The Home Office aim is for this to improve crime prevention to better protect the public. The system will be known as LEDS (Law Enforcement Data Service).

What are the aims?

The purpose of our work on this project is to establish a productive space where the Home Office and civil society organisations (CSOs) working on issues related to the PNC and PND, can have constructive conversations about the implications of the programme.

If successful, the proposed process will contribute to:

Effective civil society input into the safeguards to be used when combining the PND and PNC data-sets and the future use of data by the law enforcement community;

The development of a more robust assessment of the implications on public privacy through the use and storage of this data;

Input to shape the code of practice for this new system from participating CSOs on the use and storage of the public’s data;

The development of an ongoing process of collaboration between the Home Office, CSOs and organisations from other sectors.

What we're doing

This work is being delivered through four workshops from July 2018 through until mid 2019. Each workshop will provide CSOs with the opportunity to discuss and deliberate over the various stages and impacts of this Programme.

The process will feed into the next iteration of a Data Privacy Impact Assessment due to be published mid-2019. This will explain the mitigating steps and governance framework in place for this programme to protect the public’s data and privacy.

The aim is that the engagement with civil society will then continue, to allow ongoing input into Law Enforcement data programmes.

The first workshop was held in July 2018 as an introduction and road mapping session for the rest of the process. The second workshop was held on 4th October 2018 exploring areas such as the governance of the system, a demonstration of some concept capabilities of the new system and conversations around data inspection and sharing.

Future workshops currently planned for the process will be held on the following dates: